Why ML Needs a New Programming Language with Chris Lattner
Summary
Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, discusses his latest venture, Modular, and the programming language Mojo. He highlights the fragmentation in the AI compute landscape and the need for a unified, high-performance, and portable software stack for modern accelerators. Mojo aims to provide Pythonic usability with the low-level control and performance typically found in C++, leveraging advanced metaprogramming and a robust type system to address the challenges of heterogeneous hardware. The conversation also explores Modular's business model and the future of Mojo as a Python extension and potential Rust replacement.Episode description
Chris Lattner is the creator of LLVM and led the development of the Swift language at Apple. With Mojo, he’s taking another big swing: How do you make the process of getting the full power out of modern GPUs productive and fun? In this episode, Ron and Chris discuss how to design a language that’s easy to use while still providing the level of control required to write state of the art kernels. A key idea is to ask programmers to fully reckon with the details of the hardware, but making that work manageable and shareable via a form of type-safe metaprogramming. The aim is to support both specialization to the computation in question as well as to the hardware platform. “Somebody has to do this work,” Chris says, “if we ever want to get to an ecosystem where one vendor doesn’t control everything.”
You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.
Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:
- Democratizing AI compute (an 11-part series)
- Modular AI
- Mojo
- MLIR
- Swift